Thoughts on social media, business and journalism from Suw and Kevin Charman-Anderson

links for 2009-04-23

Kevin: Wonderful. Useful. Simple. Tony Hirst with the UK's Open University has a great tutorial on how to create a (tag or) word cloud based on a hashtag feed from Twitter. This is how simple APIs are. You can do a lot just from by modifiying URLs.

Kevin: Hat-tip for this link to journalism.co.uk. Federation of Journalist Associations in Spain says "that since June 2008, 2,221 out of a total of 30,000 Spanish journalists have lost their jobs amid a sharp drop in advertising revenues due to the economic crisis".

Kevin: Roy Greenslade writing in The Evening Standard says that free newspapers created by local councils, local government in the UK, are putting pressure on commercial local papers already under threat from the recession and severe downturn in advertising.

Kevin: Dan Gillmor expands on his concerns not about the supply but demand for content. "A key question in this emergent tsunami of information, is this one: What can we trust?" He is working on a book looking at media literacy, which has a companion site Mediactive.com.

Kevin: Suw and I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Bilton, who kindly gave us a tour of the New York Times R&D lab. Our friend Jason Brush at Schematic put us in touch after seeing we were in New York from Twitter. Nick showed us the future thinking of the news at the Times including news that follows users through their day from mobile to desktop or laptop computer and then home to their media centre. It's the kind of user-centred thinking that more newspapers need to adopt. Rather than thinking of how they'd like people to consume their content, they need to find out how people actually use it and dispense with wishful thinking and assumptions. Check out the video.

Kevin: David Weinberger live blogs a lunch talk by We, the Media author Dan Gillmor on journalism supply and demand and media literacy. David quotes Dan as saying that he's no longer worried about the supply of journalism but rather about the demand. "There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. 'The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.'"

Kevin: Aron Pilhofer explains the importance of Matt Waite's Pulitzer Prize for his PolitiFact project. Aron sums up and attempts to put to rest whether projects like PolitiFact are journalism. He writes: "PolitiFact is simple, scalable and smart. But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.

Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions — or any other you wish to find — PolitiFact more than meets the test."